He remembers the pilot saying something about them landing in a few minutes, then drifting back to sleep and waking 45 minutes or an hour later and still being in the air. They landed finally, ducked their heads in the cabin of the 57-foot, 19-seat Beechcraft 1900D twin-engine turboprop with no bathroom and emerged onto the airport tarmac as snowflakes tumbled from the heavens. Stephens heard someone say they were in Utah.

Utah?

“We thought we were supposed to be in Wyoming,” Stephens says.

And that was just the start of it.

Fifteenth-ranked San Diego State makes its annual trek into the high lonesome this weekend for men’s basketball, venturing to Laramie, the Gem City of the Plains, for a Saturday game against the Wyoming Cowboys at the Arena-Auditorium (4:30 p.m. PST, Time Warner Cable SportsNet). Give them this much: They got back on the horse. They flew charter again (and yes, they made it without drama).

“Man, the charter,” Stephens says. “That was definitely the craziest road trip. It was definitely an experience.”

A flight that normally takes two hours took 19 hours, 55 minutes, making an unscheduled overnight stop at the Crystal Inn in Cedar City, Utah, refueling the next day in Grand Junction, Colo., and arriving in Laramie seven hours before tipoff. They held the pregame walk-through in a hotel ballroom, played, won, returned to Laramie Regional Airport, ducked their heads into the 57-foot, 19-seat Beechcraft 1900D twin-engine turboprop, made another refueling stop at Grand Canyon Airport in Arizona at midnight and landed in San Diego at 1 a.m.

Five states, 35 hours.

It was the Rocky Mountain version of Gilligan’s island. A three-hour tour …

The ordeal actually began 10 days earlier, when the charter company informed SDSU officials that the 30-seat jet they had reserved had a crack in the wing and was grounded. They scrambled to find a replacement, and the best they could do was a 19-seat prop plane operated by Maverick Aviation in Henderson, Nev.

“A plane,” Fisher says, “that to the naked eye looked less than flyable.”

“Hats go off to the players and coaches who got on the plane,” Alice Buchanan-Tapley, the mother of guard Chase Tapley, wrote in the comment section below a UT San Diego story last year. “I don’t know if I would have!”

It was normally used to shuttle Las Vegas tourists for day trips to the Grand Canyon. The problem: The Grand Canyon is 169 miles away. Laramie is 868 air miles from San Diego.

The Beechcraft 1900D theoretically can fly that far on one tank of gas, but that’s before you start boarding 6-foot-9, 230-pound forwards.

“It all comes down to the amount of weight on the plane,” Brian Kroten, public relations director for Maverick Aviation, said last year. “If the plane is half full, it can make it all the way from San Diego to Laramie. Obviously with 19 athletes and baggage, it was well above our weight limit, and we needed to stop to refuel.”

That was supposed to happen in St. George, in southwestern Utah.

“We got up in the snowstorm,” Fisher says, “and I’m sitting in the front row and I can hear the pilots talking: ‘How much fuel do you think we have? Are we going to be able to find a place to land?’ I became a little nervous.”

After an hour of circling, they diverted 50 miles north to Cedar City. They refueled, but by then the snow was really coming down and the airport closed. The first thought was to bus 170 miles in the opposite direction to Las Vegas, then fly commercial the next morning to Denver, a 2½-hour drive from Laramie. But the bus companies either couldn’t or wouldn’t provide service because of the storm.

They were stuck. The Crystal Inn it was.

They returned the next morning to a plane so cold – “crazy cold,” Stephens says – that players could see their breath. Fearing snow in Laramie might divert them again, they stopped in Grand Junction to refuel.

But a funny thing happened after they landed in Laramie, having missed their designated shootaround at the Arena-Auditorium. A calm enveloped the team, a serene confidence. The Aztecs opened the second half with a 16-4 run, led by 15 and won 52-42 at a 7,220-foot venue where they rarely do.

By March, they were Mountain West co-champions.

“It was pretty cool. It built our team chemistry a little more, I think,” Stephens says. “No matter what happened, no matter what we went through to get there, we were there and we were there to play Wyoming. All the blizzards and stuff, all that was forgotten when we hit the court.”

“It made me have a tremendous appreciation for the team that we had,” Fisher says. “Not one complained a lick. No one started complaining about why did we do this, what’s going on. They just went with the flow, and that helped us win the game.”

A month later, the SDSU women made their annual trek to Wyoming. It, too, flew charter.

A mechanical problem delayed their departure for several hours, then a snowstorm forced their plane (this one actually had jet engines) to divert 50 miles east to Cheyenne, where they spent the night.

Aztecs women’s coach Beth Burns picks up the story here:

“The next day, the freeways were all still closed. This is where you just gotta love Wyoming. The National Guard and the state police led us with snowplows. We had two snowplows, Highway Patrol, National Guard, our bus and an empty bus so the (Wyoming) men could get out to come to San Diego. We drove through a whiteout.

“Part of you is saying, ‘If the roads are closed in the entire state, is there a reason for that?’ If you’ve never been in a whiteout, you’re looking out the window and seeing nothing … It was unbelievable. It was just unbelievable.”

They reached Laramie, won the game and clinched the conference championship. It was the same irony, same formula. Adversity had become advantage.

Burns puts it like this: “It becomes, ‘Let’s just win, for heaven’s sake. We’ve been doing all this – let’s just win.’”

No. 15 SDSU at Wyoming

Site/time: Arena-Auditorium, Laramie, Wyo./4:30 p.m. PST Saturday.

TV/radio: Time Warner Cable SportsNet/600-AM, 101.5-FM

Records: SDSU is 14-3, 2-1; Wyoming is 14-2, 1-2.

Series: Wyoming leads 37-34 but SDSU has won five straight and eight of 10.

Aztecs outlook: Xavier Thames made the trip to Laramie but remains iffy with a bad back. DeShawn Stephens, who was poked in the eye late against UNLV and did not return, pronounced himself fine. Also ailing, suddenly, is their 3-point shooting. After making 8 of 12 in the first half against Colorado State last Saturday, they are just 4 of 27 (14.8 percent). The other issue is offensive rebounding, after allowing 19 by Colorado State and 12 by UNLV, including three on consecutive possessions in the final 2½ minutes. The five straight wins against Wyoming is their longest active streak with a conference member (they’ve also won five straight against Mountain West newcomer Fresno State). They’ve won the last two in Laramie but never three straight. Tactically, it will be interesting to see how they handle Wyoming F Leonard Washington defensively – straight up D or a post double.

Cowboys outlook: After a 13-0 start and an appearance in the USA Today coaches Top 25, they are starting to unravel – losing on a buzzer-beater at home to Boise State and then 49-36 at Fresno State on Wednesday while shooting 24 percent (12 of 50). It’s no coincidence that senior G Luke Martinez (14.5 ppg) has missed the last four games after breaking a bone in his hand in a nasty bar brawl. He was charged with aggravated assault and battery, and has been suspended indefinitely. Derrious Gilmore (11.0 ppg) has taken over at the point for the graduated JayDee Luster (Hoover High). But the key is Washington (14.4, 8.9), the 6-7, 230-pound USC transfer who can singlehandedly take over a game. Don’t expect an up-and-down affair. The Cowboys are tops in the Mountain West and seventh nationally in scoring defense at 54.4 points. They are also 8-5 in their last 13 games against ranked opponents, most recently a 76-69 win against then-No. 19 Colorado on Dec. 1.